After You (Because of You Book 2)

by Sam Mariano

“We can talk about something else,” Henry says, noting my discomfort. “Tell me about this book. Which author? What’s it about?”

  Instead of answering him with words, I take a deep breath, take one more gulp of alcohol, and pull out my phone. I guess if I survived Derek a second time, I can probably survive letting Henry figure out my secret author identity.

  Pulling up the cover of Dreamcatcher, I offer my phone to him. “That’s the book.”

  His eyes narrow as he studies the cover. Namely, the cover model whose wedding he attended. Looking over at me as if genuinely surprised, he says, “That’s your stepmom.”

  I bring my finger to my lips to shush him, glancing back at Louise. She’s talking to some guy on her other side, so she doesn’t notice. “Yes,” I verify.

  A grin splits his face and he looks at the cover again. “Nikki Reid, huh? I guess I’m gonna have to find some reading time. I hear she wrote a pretty great trilogy.”

  “Don’t read the trilogy,” I say, softly. “Read Dreamcatcher if you want to, but… skip the trilogy.”

  Instead of refusing, instead of wanting all my words, even the ones that might hurt, Henry nods his head in easy agreement. “All right. New beginnings. I like that.”

  The bartender notices Henry sitting here now, so he stops and asks if he can get him a drink. Henry nods his head, glancing at my nearly empty glass. “You want one more?”

  I probably shouldn’t, but what the hell? “Sure, why not?”

  Henry orders us both drinks. The bartender makes our drinks and slides them in front of us.

  Henry lifts his, meets my gaze, and holds his drink in, wordlessly inviting me to share in his two-person toast. “To new beginnings,” he says.

  I lift my drink, offer him a little smile, and touch my glass to his.

  “To new beginnings,” I agree.

  Chapter Thirty Two

  After we close the bar, Henry gives me a ride home. He only had the drink we toasted with, but it was my third, so he’s in much better shape to drive than I am.

  I’m feeling lots of fidgety things. It was so nice talking to Henry at the bar tonight. He was the perfect cure for my loneliness. Derek left a crater in my heart, and Henry fills up the emptiest parts of it. I’m not sure I can be fair to him, though. I can tell he wants to try again from our conversation at the bar. From the way his gaze followed me to and from the bathroom, and the way he ignored the attractive brunette on his other side who tried to engage him in conversation while I was gone.

  I’ve had enough to drink that I can almost imagine letting him walk me inside, letting him follow me to my bedroom. Letting him take a run at chasing Derek’s memory out of that bedroom.

  Would it be the worst thing? Maybe I should root for Henry. He may not ignite me the way Derek did, he may never ignite me the way Derek always has, but do I really need that? Plenty of people live full, happy lives without ever being with someone whose love is like a fire in their soul. Plenty of healthy people have calm, loving relationships, and maybe I could be one of them.

  I’m lost in my thoughts when Henry pulls into my driveway, but his heavy sigh is enough to pull me right out of it. It’s an exasperated sigh, and he wasn’t exasperated with me last time I checked.

  My heart sinks all the way down to my foot when I see Derek’s truck parked in my driveway. Eyes wide, I search the back window, looking for the outline of his head in the driver’s seat, but the truck is empty.

  “You appear to have company,” Henry says, dryly.

  My gaze jumps to the front porch. Derek is sitting there on my bench with a bouquet of blue flowers resting on his lap.

  I have no idea what to say. I don’t know why he’s here, and I especially don’t know why he’s here with flowers. My confusion must register on my face, but Henry has been here before, so he doesn’t offer me the benefit of the doubt. When I open the car door and climb out, he does not follow me.

  Gravel crunches beneath my feet as I take a few steps toward my house, but then I pause and look back at Henry. “I…”

  He watches me struggle for words for a moment, then he just offers me a thin smile. “Good night, Nicole.”

  I watch as he backs out of the driveway and leaves. My shoulders slump and I turn back to Derek. His handsome face doesn’t convey he’s happy to see me, either. His dark golden brows are drawn together in a thunderous expression and he doesn’t even get up off the bench as I make my way up the porch steps.

  “What are you doing here, Derek?”

  Lifting the blue carnations half-heartedly, he says, “Release day. Figured I’d bring you flowers.”

  I look at the bouquet. The blue of the carnations matches the cover of my book beautifully. “They’re lovely.” Only missing a beat, I go on, “I thought we talked about how we’re not doing this anymore. How we’re over and no longer fuck buddies, and definitely no longer anything that warrants you bringing me flowers on release day.”

  “We’re soul mates,” he says flatly. “That doesn’t warrant flowers?”

  Heart sinking, I shake my head in denial as I draw my key out and clumsily push it into the lock. “Not anymore, it doesn’t.”

  “Are you back with the suit?” he asks.

  “No,” I answer, glancing at him briefly before pushing the door open. “He just gave me a ride home from the bar because I had more to drink than I intended.”

  “Mighty nice of him,” Derek mutters.

  “He’s a nice guy,” I state, stepping over the threshold and walking inside. I leave the door open in case Derek decides to follow me, and he does. I hear the door close behind me as I kick off my shoes and drop my purse on the ground.

  I don’t have the energy to go another round with Derek, and I didn’t think I’d have to. It really seemed like he was gone for good this time—two weeks without a single word. I wonder if I opened a wormhole that can’t be sealed. I wonder if I’ll have to move again. I can ask Derek to stop coming to my house and interrupting my life, but I can’t make him do it. If I stand any chance of getting past him in any capacity, this has to stop.

  I turn around to tell him that, but I lose my train of thought because his shirt is off, and God, his body is distracting.

  Shaking my head, summoning my self-control, I tell him, “No, Derek. We already had goodbye sex, we are not doing this again.”

  Instead of arguing or really even answering me, he points at the tattoo inked on his left side. “You never asked me about this.”

  Swallowing, I nod my head. “I know. There’s a lot we never covered. We just… ran out of time.”

  “Two hearts. One soul. It’s a paraphrased quote,” he states. “I couldn’t get the whole thing, because someone’s wordy.”

  My heart drops, a feeling of dread creeping up on me. I hope that doesn’t mean what I think it means.

  Then Derek begins speaking, and it only takes seconds for me to recognize where he’s quoting from. “‘Life is full of questions without answers, but as we lie tangled together, our hearts beating in unison, I know the definitive answer to one of them. I know that despite our many mistakes, despite the lost time we can never get back, and the little hurts that piled up along the way, there is nobody else out there for me. As reckless as he’d been with my heart, as much as he’d hurt me, I wouldn’t trade a single minute with him for a lifetime with someone else. Nobody else could fit me the way he does—the way he always has, the way he always will. I may not have chosen to fall in love with him, but for both our sakes, I’ll choose to love him now.’”

  Tears well up in my eyes at this unspeakable cruelty. At the unfairness of him seducing me with my own words, prying open the sealed-shut door to the heart he shattered so many years ago. “Stop,” I whisper.

  Of course, he doesn’t. “‘Our hearts beat together now, like they’ve known the secret all along. Like they’ve been waiting for us to catch up. He and I may have two separate hearts, but we share the same soul. I’m not positive where we go from he
re, but of one thing I am certain: wherever we end up, we will go there together.’”

  Tears flow freely down my face now, so I wipe them away. I haven’t read my own books in ages, and his words remind me why. The pain is excruciating. There is so much love and pain and longing locked away inside Janie. All my hopes and dreams, poured into her, stitched up, and imprisoned between the pages of those books so I can live my life without their weight on my shoulders.

  “We can have the same ending you gave them. Choose to love me now, Nikki,” he implores, meeting my gaze.

  Brushing away another tear, I shake my head. “You swore you wouldn’t do this. You told me you accepted that it was over, that you weren’t here to ask me to come back—”

  “I wasn’t,” he interrupts. “Did I ask you to come back that night? No. I did what I came to do and left.”

  “And what are you here to do now, huh? Break off another piece of my heart? Don’t you know you already have the whole thing? I don’t have anything left to give you, Derek.”

  “You have this,” he states, touching the inked skin reverently, like my words mean as much to him as they do to me.

  Shaking my head, I tell him, “My love can’t trump your reality. My words don’t have power outside the pages of those books. Please stop making me turn you away. It kills me a little more every time.”

  Instead of arguing with me, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a rolled up stack of papers. His next words seem needlessly mean, and they nearly stop my heart. “I found Kayla.”

  I stare at him, my chest tight, my eyes wide. “Okay. I don’t know why you’re telling me that. I didn’t even know you were looking for her.”

  He holds out the rolled up papers for me to take. I do, carefully unrolling them and reading the top sheet to see what the hell this is all about.

  Navigating the stepparent adoption process

  Now my heart completely stops. My questioning gaze jumps to his.

  “I want you to adopt Cassidy,” he states. Shaking his head as if to cut me off before I can even utter a single syllable, he says, “I hired a lawyer, I’ve researched the process, I have done all my homework, Nikki. Even if Kayla didn’t want to give up her rights, we probably could have done it because she has made no attempt to contact Cassidy in any way for almost four whole years, and that’s abandonment, plain and simple. But I didn’t want to bring this to you until it was foolproof, until I was sure she wouldn’t be a problem. I talked to her, told her it’s what’s best for Cassidy… I may have mentioned that if she would voluntarily terminate her parental rights, I wouldn’t go after her for the four years of child support she owes me.”

  Heart in my throat, I wish I could fast forward him to the important part. “And what did she say?”

  “She agreed,” he tells me. “I have to fly her out here for the hearing, but she’s going to give up her legal rights to Cassidy.” Taking a steps forward, he says more seriously, “Do you understand what this means? I’ll never have to choose between you and Cassidy again, because she will be yours. You, me, and Cassidy will be a family. Kayla will have no rights to her. It’s irreversible, I already checked. She can’t change her mind and fight it down the road. It can be like you’re the one I knocked up in high school, Nikki. You can be Cassidy’s real mom, and we can be together.”

  I can’t breathe. All I can do is stare as Derek closes the distance between us, backing me up against my wall and cradling my face in his hands. His blue eyes dance with affection as he looks down at me. “We can have everything, Nikki. Just say yes.”

  It feels like there’s no floor beneath my feet, like I’m standing on air. There was an insurmountable obstacle in our way, the same one that has always been there… but this time instead of letting that mountain stand between us, Derek moved it. For me.

  I nod my head, not entirely trusting myself to speak.

  Hope jumps in his eyes. “Yeah?”

  I nod more fervently, bringing a shaky hand to his face and pulling him in for a kiss. I’m still not very composed, but it doesn’t matter. “Yes,” I murmur against his lips. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

  His low chuckle lights up parts of my heart I haven’t used in years. It feels like his words poured life directly into my veins, restoring parts of my soul I thought had died. Then he has the absolute gall to tease, “Are you sure?”

  I release his face to smack him in the stomach. “Don’t push your luck, Noble.”

  Smirking, he lets his hands fall to my ass, then he lifts me. I wrap my arms around his waist and he starts walking toward my bedroom. “I am a pretty lucky man,” he agrees.

  Smiling, I lean in and brush my lips across his before murmuring, “You sure are.”

  Chapter Thirty Three

  I never want to leave Derek’s embrace, but eventually we have to get up. After we fucked each other to sheer exhaustion last night, he fell asleep in my bed. I don’t know if he intended to stay the night or not, but he definitely did.

  I snuggle closer, running my hand along his jaw, then threading my fingers through his hair.

  Without opening his eyes, he murmurs, “You can keep doing that.”

  Smiling, I lean in and brush my lips against his. “We need to get up.”

  “Don’t say because you’re kicking me out so you can work,” he says. “My two weeks of not being able to complain about your job have passed, and I am ready to make up for all the missed opportunities.”

  Rolling my eyes lightly, I say, “No, not because I have to work.” Then, poking him, I say, “You probably stopped talking to me for two weeks just because you knew you weren’t allowed to bitch at me.”

  Now he grins, opening his eyes. “No, that was just a happy coincidence.”

  “You’re a cheater. I want a rematch, and if I win again, you have to give me another two weeks.”

  Locking his arm around my waist and drawing me close, he says, “Or we could not do that, because I’ve already won everything I want.”

  “I see how you play,” I tell him with playful disapproval.

  “Yep,” he murmurs, kissing the side of my neck. “Dirty as fuck.”

  His lips send shivers down my spine, but I resist the urge to turn into a puddle of goo. There’s still too much to figure out to spend the whole morning the way we spent the whole night. “Well, you don’t have everything you want. We still live three hours away from each other, and I can’t imagine things can stay that way if I’m going to adopt Cassidy. Someone is going to have to move.”

  Nodding his head, he says, “Someone will.”

  Sighing, I fix my eyes on his. “I imagine you want it to be me.”

  “It’s a discussion we need to have,” he tells me. “I’m not going to unilaterally decide who has to pick up and move their whole life. It would be harder for me, though. I have a job there; Cassidy already has friends and family, a home, a bedroom she’s used to. It’s already going to be a lot of change for her—good change, but still change. Making her move here would be…”

  “Unfair,” I realize, my gaze dropping to his chest.

  He nods his head reluctantly, probably still expecting my resistance. “It would be hard.”

  It would be easier for me to move, there are no two ways about it. Right now Nadia and Louise come to my house to work, but they could easily do the same work from home. If they don’t have good enough machines, I could buy them each a work computer. “I guess I won’t have to fix that roof after all,” I tell him.

  Trailing his fingers along my shoulder, he smiles. “Yeah? Just like that?”

  I shrug one shoulder, looking up at him. “Everything I like is at your house, anyway. You only have three bedrooms, though. Before you put a baby in me, we need to move to a bigger house, because I need an office. There’s no way I’ll hold onto my sanity without an office I can shut myself inside when I need to work, because you and Cassidy both clearly want us to be hobos.”

  Smiling faintly, Derek shakes his he
ad. “We wouldn’t be hobos. I could support us on my pay.”

  I shake my head. “Don’t push your luck. I’ve already agreed to move in with you, but full dependence is out of the question.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting you should stop working, I was just telling you we wouldn’t be hobos. I can turn the third bedroom into your office though, that won’t be a problem. We mostly use it for storage now anyway. Maybe next summer we can look into buying a bigger house. We’ll save up for a down payment throughout the fall and winter months.”

  “I can cover the down payment. We don’t have to save up for that. Dreamcatcher released well, plus I’ll be selling my house to move, so… in two months, we’re going to have some money coming in.”

  “Well, yeah, but this adoption thing is going to be a few thousand dollars, too. Plus, I actually think we should replace your roof and spruce this place up before you sell it, that way we can make a little more on it. I noticed your bathroom faucet is leaky, too. You really should’ve told me about that.”

  Shrugging, I tell him, “I forgot. I never have time to notice things.”

  Now he rolls his eyes, but as soon as he opens his mouth to undoubtedly complain about my job, I interrupt.

  “I am going to hire a proofreader, like you suggested. I have some interested applicants already. And I will talk to Louise and see if she’d like to go full-time, that way I can start taking a day or two off every week. I’ll try to make a more Noble-friendly work schedule so I have some time off in the evenings once you guys get home from work and school.”

  “Thank you,” he says, leaning in to kiss me.

  “You made many valid points. I mean, if I’m going to have the life of my dreams, I should make some time to live it.”

  ---

  Even though Derek pointed out that Cassidy was already on board with me moving in and being her new mom, and even though she’s not quite six and probably won’t understand the permanence, I tell Derek we need to ask Cassidy if this is what she wants before we move forward. Most kids don’t get to pick their parents, but I wouldn’t feel right about not asking her first.